5G Reality is Going to Match the Hype, Says Cisco CEO

“We have done a study and we believe that by 2022 there will be over 400 million 5G connections,” says Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins. “This is one of those great examples where the reality is going to match the hype building up to this.” Robbins adds: “If you think about what this is going to create, we believe in 2022 the amount of new traffic created in that year will actually exceed all of the traffic that has been created since the inception of the internet.”

Chuck Robbins, CEO of Cisco, discusses how technology is now defining enterprise strategy and how 5G is going to impact connectivity in an interview on Fox Business:

Technology is at the Heart of the Strategy

This technology is at the heart of the strategy of our customers. It is no longer enabling their strategy. They’re taking the technology and then they are defining their strategy based on what it makes possible. A lot of the focus over the last decade has been around consumer tech. If it’s on your phone you know what it does. If you use a social media app then you know what it does. What we do isn’t that clear to the everyday investor.

The technology that we are building are really enabling our enterprise customers and public sector customers to digitize and really take advantage of new methods of revenue stream. In the case of the public sector, new ways of delivering citizen services. Putting video connectivity out into rural areas and delivering citizen services virtually. There are all these things that are happening that are leading to continued demand.

5G Reality is Going to Match the Hype

We’ve been talking about 5G for many years. The trials are beginning this year. This is one of those great examples where the reality is going to match the hype building up to this. The fundamental difference that this technology is going to bring is (massive). In 2022 you’re going to see speeds that average 4-5 times more than we get today. If you think about what it enables, not only higher speeds and lower latency for mobile devices, but we are going to get connectivity into rural areas that we haven’t been able to because the cost of digging trenches and laying fiber has just been prohibitive. Now we can do this with 5G.

We are going to be able to connect people who have not been connected before. We have done a study and we believe that by 2022 there will be over 400 million 5G connections. What happens is when you get to a place where you have all of this high bandwidth capacity out at the edge of the network then the core infrastructure has to be updated to actually accommodate that. That’s one of the big roles that we are going to play is delivering innovation that actually allows our customers to deal with all this traffic.

5G is going to provide everything from the ability to connect IoT devices to things in your home and vehicles, all the way to connecting enterprise branch locations. The whole notion of lower latency is really what’s required to do real-time video applications. If you think about what this is going to create, we believe in 2022 the amount of new traffic created in that year will actually exceed all of the traffic that has been created since the inception of the internet.